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Billfishing's Brightest Star
by Roy Attaway (cont)
Billfishing Mecca
We all knew about Piņas Bay and Tropic Star Lodge. We'd heard about them for years. The place was a Mecca for big-game fishermen from all over the world. So it took no persuasion for us to change our collective minds and head south (or east, as the case may be, because Panama runs at a right angle to the rest of Central America; the canal actually runs north-south, even though you may be going east-west.) The next morning, under nonthreatening skies, we left the protective cup of Piņas Bay, heading out around Punta Jacque into the long, slow swell of the Pacific. Within about half an hour, Ronnie spotted six sails on the surface, definitely a promising sign, one further reinforced shortly afterward when our first two baits were inhaled as soon as they hit the water. During the next five minutes, we hooked another three sailfish. By 2 p.m., our strikes totaled 51, with 25 sailfish wired and released. Our final tally was 34 for 64. We never boated one, but my guess is these fish were in the 80- to 100-pound range.
Even that astonishing figure doesn't tell the entire story. All day long, we saw an incredible number of free jumpers, sometimes two or three in concert. One, in fact, "greyhounded" across the water 11 times. In all our years of fishing (more than 150, collectively), we had never seen such a display of sailfish activity. We learned quickly why "Panama" translates roughly as "land of many fish."
That evening, back in the bay and the embrace of a soft tropical evening, we went ashore to have dinner at the luxurious Tropic Star Lodge. There, not only did we enjoy a fantastic meal, but we also discovered a jewel in the jungle.
Shown on many contemporary maps as a blank, the province of Daren-where we were-is the almost lawless border between Panama and Colombia, where even the Pan-American Highway judders to a halt. In some ways it resembles the Na Pali coast of Kauai in Hawaii. The 3,500-foot mountains of the Sapo (Toad) range plunge dramatically into the sea, intersticed with strips of brilliant beach. Now and then a fisherman's shack breaks the thick jungle shield; waterfalls appear as a white gash in the rainforest, and the ocean fringe is a receding series of headlands calving rocky islets. Dramatic. Isolated. Beautiful.
You may recall Keats' line: "Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes/He star'd at the Pacific-and with all his men/Looked at each other with a wild surmise/Silent upon a peak in Darien . . ." (Forget that Cortez never got south of Mexico-it was Vasco Nuņez de Balboa with 190 soldiers who discovered the Pacific. Call it poetic license, I suppose. But definitely call the Pacific Coast of Panama fantastic.)
Author and angler Zane Grey was the first sportsman to fish these waters, back in the 1920s. Later, in 1961, a wealthy Texan named Ray Smith built his home-away-from-home at the head of Piņas Bay. Within four years, it was expanded and opened as Club de Pesca de Panama. Smith died in 1968, and the lodge was bought by Edwin Kennedy, who renamed it Tropic Star, a companion property to his Arctic Star Lodge in Canada.
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